This invention relates to updating voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and related network devices.
The VoIP promises economical, convenient and flexible voice and other media communication over internet protocol based networks. The providers of VoIP telephony offer their subscribers unprecedented low, long distance and international, rates and a number of attractive services. Popular services that attract an increasing number of subscribers include traditional telephony oriented services, such as multiple lines and phone numbers, voice and video conferencing, intelligent forwarding, auto answering and, efficient customer assistance. At the same time, the Internet environment facilitates provisioning of VoIP services based on integrating voice with multi media messaging and electronic commerce. To support the emerging services, the VoIP providers deploy new type of phone devices, capable to support voice, text and image communication. Some of the new phone devices, such as the session initiation protocol (SIP) phones are deployed in home and office local area networks (LANs). As the VoIP services are continuously improved and new services are provided, both the phone devices and the supporting network devices need to be updated in order to support the latest versions of the VoIP services.